Photo of Bill RoscoeFront cover of bookHome page

Welcome to the web site of Bill Roscoe's book Understanding Concurrent Systems (here on Springer's site), published 2010, ISBN 978-1-84882-257-3.  On this site the book is abbreviated UCS and Bill's previous book "Theory and Practice of Concurrency" is abbreviated TPC.

Clicking on the picture of the book in this site will return you to this home page.

This site provides links to:

About the book

There is a summary of each chapter of the book here.

UCS is a sort of sequel to TCP.  While continuing the mixture of theory and practice it is more tool based.  There are four parts:


Part 1 is a revised version of the first part of TPC.  It has more extensive case studies, and a long chapter on the use of FDR, while leaving out some of the more technical mathematical material from Part 1 or TPC. 

While Part 1 is self contained, Parts 2 and 3 refer freely to material from TPC.

Part 2 provides a number of new perspectives on the theory of CSP, including revised operational semantics, and both denotational and algebraic ones based on a newly analysed hierarchy of models. 

Part 3 gives extra guidance on the use of CSP and FDR, including ways to handle timed systems and verify parameterised systems.

Part 4 show how a variety of other models of concurrent system can be simulated in CSP and verified on FDR.  These include shared variable, prioritised and mobile systems. 

You can read the book's frontmatter (Preface, Acknowledgements, Contents).

You can contact the author via Bill.Roscoe (at) comlab.ox.ac.uk

This site is presently under construction: some of the advertised material may not yet be available.